1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of digital pathology and more specifically relates to systems and methods for improving the image quality of a digital slide image for diagnostic resolution.
2. Related Art
While scientific measures such as modulation transfer function (“MTF”), resolution and the signal to noise ratio (“SNR”) can be used to objectively quantify image capture devices, it is relatively difficult to objectively assess the quality or interpretability of the imagery data that is generated by such devices, particularly when the imagery data is destined to be subjectively examined by a human, for example in the evaluation of digital slide images in pathology.
Furthermore, the challenges associated with assessing image quality and/or interpretability are exacerbated for digital slide images that are read by pathologists because digital slides are extraordinarily large, typically multiple gigabytes in size. This significant amount of imagery data makes it very difficult to examine every area of a digital slide at full resolution to determine its quality and/or interpretability. Additionally, the patterns (i.e., the features and clues) that pathologists look for when making a diagnosis vary between tissue types and this is further confounded because there is no formal agreement among pathologists about the criteria and tasks used to make diagnoses of specific tissue types. Further, analysis of digital slide images and diagnosis based on digital slide images is made difficult by weak stains that result in faint coloring, strong stains that result in heavy coloring, non-standardized digital image characteristics of stains, similarly colored stains in a single slide, stains with low contrast to each other on a single slide, and poorly physical slide preparation. Therefore, what is needed is a system and method that provides improved quality and/or interpretability of a digital slide image to overcome these significant problems as described above.